By Regina Kim Negotiation is part of our daily lives, whether it is over who will do household chores at home or how many vacation days one should get at work. Given the importance of negotiating, have you ever wondered what kinds of people are effective negotiators?
Dr. Elfenbein from Washing University in St. Louis recently published a summary of findings (2015) from studies that examine the influence of personal characteristics on negotiation effectiveness.
  • Abilities: IQ, emotional intelligence, creativity, and cultural intelligence each tend to improve win-win outcomes. However, the notion that improving one’s ability improves a person’s negotiation skills has not been validated to date.
  • Personality: Personality has been defined as any characteristic involving consistent patterns in thought, behavior, and feelings. Most studies that examine the “Big Five” (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness) found no effects of these traits on negotiation effectiveness. A notable exception is that extraversion and agreeableness tend to be liabilities in strictly competitive situations (Barry & Friedman, 1998; Dimotakis, Conlon, & Ilies, 2012).
  • Negotiators who generally experience more positive emotions and less negative emotions tend to arrive to better negotiation solutions.
As the author claims, there are few consistent findings across studies. However, there is one characteristic that consistently influences negotiation effectiveness: positive expectations.
  • In negotiation, mind-set matters and confidence that one can succeed has the strongest influence compared to all other types of individual differences.
In other words, holding positive expectations and beliefs about negotiating was the single best and well-replicated factor across all studies. This is cause for optimism, given that attitudes can be changed more easily (albeit not without effort) than personality traits or abilities.   Everyday negotiators and negotiation coaches alike would benefit from encouraging confidence and positive expectations.
  Elfenbein, H.A. (2015). Individual differences in negotiation: A nearly abandoned pursuit revived. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 131-136.
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Categories: Blog, Negotiation

Published September 11, 2015